


that i would name the stars for you

by hegelsholiday



Series: hierarchy [2]
Category: INFINITE (Band)
Genre: M/M, Organized Crime AU, sunggyu does not understand emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24637576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hegelsholiday/pseuds/hegelsholiday
Summary: sunggyu was too fucking soft for this business, and jang dongwoo was living proof of that.
Relationships: Jang Dongwoo/Kim Sunggyu
Series: hierarchy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1781374
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	that i would name the stars for you

sunggyu sent dongwoo off in the middle of rush hour. 

“do you want me to go?” dongwoo asked. 

that was not a question sunggyu had steeled himself to answer out loud. “you’re the one i trust the most,” he said instead. 

it was only logical. sunggyu needed someone he could trust to report everything in daegu back to him. someone with the perspective necessary to accurately judge the situation. soojung had been passing along reports of rival gang activity in the area for a while now, and much as mijoo was a particularly frightening worker when needed, sunggyu wouldn’t bet anything on her trustworthiness. conveniently, it was a fact that dongwoo was both extremely loyal and observant. logical. 

“okay, okay.” dongwoo nodded, like that said everything. he glanced back behind him, at woohyun waiting at the train station terminal. sunggyu followed his gaze, curling his lip as woohyun stared back at him challengingly. 

something ugly reared inside him, something that sunggyu steadfastly refused to label jealousy. he patted dongwoo’s hand. “your train’s about to depart,” he said. “have a safe trip.” 

dongwoo smiled. he wondered if the other knew how much he’d uprooted his life, how much he’d forced sunggyu to reorient his world around him. he leaned closer, stretching up to press a kiss against sunggyu’s cheek. “don’t worry, hyung. i’ll be back in a few months.” 

“obviously you will,” he sniffed. as if he would worry about that at all. “you’d better send me updates regularly. i’m not sending you there for a vacation.” 

“of course.” and sunggyu let dongwoo pull him into a hug and didn’t feel like he’d let go until long after the train had left the terminal. 

( _three months his phone chimed. i’ll miss you!!!_ )

\---  
a week after dongwoo had left, sunggyu squatted in the corner of the third floor hallway outside his office and lit a cigarette absently. there was always work to be done, locations and employees to be checked again. the city never slept, and so without dongwoo to distract him, sunggyu never stopped either. there was no longer a presence hovering over him in the office, no longer a companion he could absently chat with or share strange quips with, but that. that was fine. 

(“you’ll live longer if you quit,” the memory of dongwoo said. the half-lit cigarette dangled from his fingers and scattered ash across the hotel room carpet. 

“i don’t intend to live forever,” sunggyu had said then. they’d been in europe then, london. in a sparse room that had been booked at the last minute, because dongwoo had wanted to sightsee, and sunggyu had seen any reason not to. “when you live too long in this business, you eventually see your own hard work crumble before your eyes.”

“i think you’re wrong,” dongwoo said. “i think hyung is just as afraid of dying.” there was a gun in his hands then, and the way dongwoo held it you could hardly tell that this was the kid who’d once cried over the very thought of shooting one. he pressed the weight of it to sunggyu’s forehead, so that they were staring across from each other in some strange heart to heart. the cigarette in his hand burned out painfully as he squeezed it. 

“what are you doing?” he said carefully. there was one brief terrifying moment where sunggyu thought that this was it, that dongwoo, like all others, had turned on him. but the look in the other’s eyes was something like amusement, light and innocent. 

“you’re shaking, hyung,” dongwoo said. it was a testament to the warmth that he naturally exuded that he still managed to sound so gentle. sunggyu glanced down at the hands that had started fidgeting, as if on instinct. “don’t you trust me?” 

“not with a gun pointed at my head,” he said dryly. “you’ll have to forgive me for that.” 

the weight of the gun disappeared. whatever else he had been about to say dried in his throat. dongwoo smiled, sheepish, as if all of the boldness had suddenly drained out of his bones. “ah, sorry about that.” 

“don’t ever do that again,” sunggyu said, gripping dongwoo’s shoulders and pressing their foreheads together. “i would hate to have to find a way to get rid of you.” 

“you shouldn’t smoke,” dongwoo insisted. “it makes your breath smell terrible.” and (just for the sake of peace, of not having another weapon drawn on him, of course) sunggyu slid the rest of the package away and tried not to think about it.) 

now, sunggyu sighed and dropped the half-lit cigarette in his hands, grinding it under his heel. the things that he had found comfort and escape in before dongwoo seemed petty and meager now, in the face of his absence. it was a damning thought. 

dongwoo kicked his paperwork around on his desk and broke his coffee mugs and did a damn good job throwing his thoughts into disorder with those wide eyes of his, but without his hovering now there was something lonely about the offices late at night. 

slowly, without sunggyu’s conscious knowledge, it seemed that jang dongwoo had made himself indispensable, impossibly important to the day to day machine he relied on so closely. his absence had become a persistent sort of reminder that ground at the back of his head, a reminder of the cold, mechanical manner in which he had approached daily life. 

\---  
dongwoo sent him messages. regular updates, punctuated with strange emoticons and an overabundance of exclamation points. the reports themselves were concise, formal, very un-dongwoo like. 

in return, sunggyu hesitantly sent him images of the darkened city skylines and quiet snippets of his own work, like a gift exchange. he was reminded, staring at the stark white blond of sungjong’s hair, that dongwoo liked bright things. carnival-level flashy, things that sunggyu would’ve considered insignificant. 

_daegu is fun_ dongwoo wrote in between quiet hours _but it’s not the same without hyung_. sunggyu nearly flung his phone into the wall for that one. 

_you’re not there to have fun_ he texted back. 

a small, forlorn _:(_ was all he got back, and sunggyu spent the rest of the evening wondering if he’d unintentionally upset him. 

he typed _it’s good that you’re having fun in daegu dongwoo-yah_ once and deleted it just as quickly, feeling awkward and burdened by the inability to read dongwoo’s face. eventually, upon not receiving a response, he put his phone away and tried once again to concentrate on work. 

( _sorry_ his phone buzzed later at three in the morning. _got a little sidetracked there._ ) 

\---  
sunggyu was flying again. 

“hyung-nim.” 

he turned around slowly, already expecting the sight of dongwoo. there was a moodiness to his expression, a kind of unknown quality that sunggyu could not parse out from the distance. 

“i thought i told you not to call me that.”

“i thought hyung liked being respected.” 

no. hierarchical divisions were for people sunggyu did not deign to sleep with and keep on his payroll for sentimental reasons, but that was neither here nor there. more than that, the title sounded wrong coming from dongwoo. like it was a little too respectful, too polite in a way that implied distance. it was to dongwoo’s credit, he supposed, that he somehow made such a title offensive when drawn from his lips. 

“you’re a lot of trouble, you know. i should’ve stopped this when i found out you could hardly tell a single straight-faced lie,” he said. there was a set order to the way sunggyu ran his circles, ran his life, with each person he deigned to interact with weighed on the scale of practicality, usefulness. 

“maybe you should’ve,” dongwoo said. “but you don’t really mean that.” 

sunggyu considered him for a moment. among the clouds, dongwoo stood out too much, in several shades of color too bright for his tastes. “you’re the least conventional person i’ve ever met,” he said. “i can’t tell if i love or hate that about you.” 

dongwoo broke into a sudden laugh. he tilted his head back, as if sunggyu were the anomaly in the room, something he couldn’t quite understand. “hyung, you’re dreaming.”

\---  
a month in, soojung opened the door of his office without knocking. 

if there was one person that preferred and respected, at the very least, the pretense of formal hierarchy as much as he did, it was soojung. for her to enter without knocking meant that she considered a given issue urgent enough not to waste time doing so. 

“the local police are catching on. in terms of area capacity, there’s simply not enough room for us to operate as freely as we’d like in the daegu outfit without sacrificing our current organizational advantages.” 

sunggyu looked up. soojung’s lips were pressed firm together, face pinched and tight. that, plus the fact that soojung herself had a strong dislike for exaggeration, was enough to confirm the prominence of their current issue. 

“and the current state of conflict with the local gangs?” 

“minimal at the moment. both of us are trying our best to avoid each other and starting something that will attract real attention and thus, repercussions from law enforcement.”

“in terms of organized violence, we ought to outflank them easily.” 

“possibly,” soojung said. “it’s not so certain. with the right...incentive it’s possible we can come to an agreement, or eventually absorb them as a branch organization. as it is, they know of and mistrust mijoo and the regulars. her reputation in the area is rather infamous.”

he frowned. “you’re suggesting we let the seoul branch members handle them then?” 

“dongwoo-ssi seems like a very likeable person,” soojung said. she managed a polite smile that seemed more like a grimace. “even mijoo has expressed her agreeability with his presence. out of our current active seoul agents, he would make a very good candidate to be stationed for a longer term in daegu to conduct negotiations.” 

soojung was a highly efficient worker, particularly when it came to managing the semi-legitimate fronts for their business, but sunggyu often had the impression that she was mocking him through behind her terse words. certainly, her recommendations carried merit. it was both logical and convenient to simply let woohyun and dongwoo carry on their current assignment in daegu with only a change in duration. a year ago, sunggyu would have agreed to them without much further thought. 

“always something to be noted,” he said instead, smiling idly (a habit that he seemed to have picked up from dongwoo). mijoo was not particularly known for her friendliness towards those she considered outsiders. 

for some reason, the thought that others were as easily charmed by dongwoo as he was didn’t sit quite right. 

\---  
(sunggyu had observed dongwoo in action once, long before he had represented anything other than a strange anomaly in a network of informants. he’d sat a few tables over, absentmindedly ordered a drink he disliked, and watched. 

dongwoo was a natural at putting people at ease, of somehow being effortlessly likeable. unlike woohyun, who could be too much and too sweet all at once, he lived and breathed the natural air of comfort that made people want to talk to him. 

so sunggyu watched, one step, two steps, watched him slowly slide his hands to rest on top of the woman’s, watched as his eyes curved as he laughed along with her. 

“her boyfriend’s making plans to flee the country,” dongwoo told him afterwards. there had been a faint trace of surprise as he caught sunggyu’s eye on his way out (a hand on the woman’s shoulder, light enough to be taken as merely a deferential reassurance), something sunggyu had yet to train out of him (he never would, not fully; dongwoo had always interacted with the world in a way that lacked the stifling constant self awareness sunggyu had come to drape himself with). 

“already?” he said, taking note in the back of his mind. dongwoo shrugged. his posture seemed stiffer now, and it set sunggyu on edge too. but when he smiled, it was the same one he’d given the woman, bright and so charmingly genuine. 

“hyung-nim is a little scary sometimes.” 

“only a little?” he’d said dryly, and somehow found himself quirking the corner of his mouth up too as dongwoo burst into a renewed peal of laughter. 

dongwoo made it easy to laugh, at or with him. back then, it hadn’t been much of a problem that this particular quality of his also applied very much to sunggyu.)

\---  
sunggyu sighed, checking his phone for updates one last time before he got completely wasted and lost all sense of judgment. he slipped it back into his pocket as the door of the booth opened, trying to smooth out his face as best he could. 

hoya was a poor fit as far as conventional subordinates went--he was sharp tongued and downright rude, keenly observant for any small detail that he could pick at. this, combined with his versatility, made him an effective worker and little else. asking if he wanted to drink with sunggyu was probably inviting trouble on himself, especially since he’d eventually have to explain the occasion for drinking. 

still, there was nobody else around that sunggyu would trust to potentially dump his woes on. 

“i hope you’re paying,” hoya greeted him, sliding into the private booth without a sound. 

sunggyu frowned at him, nursing at his half-opened bottle. “i’m still technically your boss.” 

“therefore, you have more money than me.” 

“one day, i’ll actually fire you,” he sighed, taking a large gulp. 

“right. why’d you call all of a sudden? i was having fun without you.” 

“i don’t like drinking alone.” 

hoya laughed so hard that sunggyu had the strong, incredibly petty urge to toss the rest of his bottle in his face. 

“if you say so.”

sunggyu scowled deeply and swallowed another mouthful of alcohol to make himself feel better. this was a personal pity party after all, and the good thing about drinking with hoya was that he was content to snipe and laugh at sunggyu wallowing in his own misery without ever asking why. 

it was a very good thing, because sunggyu did not want to think about the why behind his current discontent at all. 

\---  
the issue was that letting dongwoo stay in daegu was not a very appealing, or viable, for that matter, option in his head. 

and so, because sunggyu was selfish and not immune to questionable judgment calls himself, he pulled up the contact of someone that he’d normally try to avoid speaking to as much as necessary. 

the phone rang more than three times before the other end picked up, and sunggyu tried to suppress the urge to scowl. 

“sungyeol,” he said, not bothering to listen to the other’s half-assed greetings over the phone. “i’m reassigning you to the daegu outfit with woohyun. consider it a fairly long term assignment for now. you’ll have a week to pack your things and arrange your personal affairs.” 

he hung up before sungyeol could answer.

so he had his own favorites and his own reasons for not letting dongwoo stay where he was. 

there was nothing wrong with this. 

\---  
the day dongwoo was supposed to come back, it rained all morning. ironically, perhaps, it was also the day sunggyu made the mistake of trusting the weather forecast and opted not to bring an umbrella, resulting in a very undignified dash from the car to a more sheltered area than the open street. 

he was three minutes late to pick dongwoo up and was in the process of somewhat apologetically pushing past the people milling around to try to find him when the other wrapped his arms around him. 

“hyung.” perhaps it was his own sense of hurry, but dongwoo’s voice sounded oddly breathless against his ear. 

“you’re back,” sunggyu said, and didn’t push dongwoo away when he showed no sign of letting go. 

“you came to see me.” dongwoo was beaming. “doesn’t hyung have more important things to do than pick people like me up? does that mean you missed me too?” 

sunggyu had the sudden urge to say something abominably cheesy, something like _i’ve never actually met anyone like you._ “yes,” he said. “you should be grateful, you know. i braved the rain without an umbrella for you.” the second question, he willfully ignored. 

“you didn’t have to do that. i didn’t ask for you not to bring an umbrella. but,” he added, when he caught sunggyu’s expression, “i am very happy that hyung is here.” 

\---  
“i think you’ve made me soft,” sunggyu said that night in light accusation, circling his fingers around dongwoo’s forearm contemplatively. “i don’t know how you managed it, but it’s making business less smooth than usual.” 

“hyung,” dongwoo laughed, light against his shoulder. something in his chest squeezed painfully tight. this was not how any of this was supposed to go. “you’ve always been soft.”

his hand on dongwoo’s arm stilled. jang dongwoo had defied all expectations sunggyu had set for him since day one. this was nothing new, sunggyu reassured himself. 

“what do you mean by that?” he finally asked. 

“i’ve seen you,” dongwoo said. he had such round eyes. sunggyu had never quite noticed the intensity behind them as well as he did now. “you act like others in our line of work—the threats, the violence. but sometimes you—well. you just seemed lonely.” 

sunggyu huffed, a little indignant despite himself. he reached out, switching the lights off. “good night dongwoo-yah,” he said, dragging the covers up to wrap around them. it was a petty move, sure, but he was still the other’s boss, even if those lines had been blurred and crossed far too much for his own comfort. 

dongwoo chuckled. “it’s alright hyung, i won’t tell anyone,” he whispered. sunggyu rolled over in the dark and wondered when he’d started letting underlings think they had any right to the spaces in his head. 

(sunggyu was never _lonely_. dongwoo was wrong anyways.) 

\---  
sunggyu often rose before dongwoo in the mornings to clean up and dress for the day-to-day machine of operations. it was a method of separation, of establishing distance. in the mornings, there was no evidence that sunggyu kissed dongwoo in the shadows of bathroom corners, like the raw, dizzying intimacy of nights they spent together merely evaporated with the sunrise. daylight took the sense of secrecy, security, a harsh mockery of some fairytale circumstance. 

he’d woken up late today; dongwoo’s arms wrapped firmly around him as he stirred lightly beside him. they stumbled over each other in the middle of routines, the kind of disruption that he was normally too irritable in mornings to tolerate, but sunggyu slipped a hand in dongwoo’s hair and learned to forgive the interruption. 

“are you aware that you kick in your sleep?” dongwoo said, flicking bathroom sink water over his face. 

behind him, sunggyu blinked. “are you aware that you have a tendency towards hogging all the blankets?” 

dongwoo smiled. he reached over, picking out a stray fluff of feather in sunggyu’s hair. “did you sleep well, hyung?”

he had. he’d slept very well. “yes,” sunggyu said. “and you?”

“hyung works hard. i’m glad.” the thing about jang dongwoo was that he had a way of somehow meaning every word he said. sunggyu flicked him on the forehead for good measure. 

“you didn’t answer my question,” he said, but found himself unable to muster much bite in his tone. 

“i lied,” dongwoo said, trailing out of his bathroom. “i don’t know if you kick in your sleep. i slept through all of it.” 

sunggyu rolled his eyes at his reflection, brushing himself off again before following him out of the room. in the hallway, he paused to check his phone. a status update from soojung. a string of reports from various unknown numbers. nothing out of the ordinary. 

“hyung,” dongwoo called. “why is the rest of your place also this boring? there’s nothing to eat either.” 

he frowned, feeling strangely self-conscious as he made his way to the kitchen. if the place was boring, it was only because sunggyu rarely actually slept in the various apartments he maintained across the city, whether out of convenience’s sake or the lingering paranoia he would likely never be able to shake off. there was something inherently wasteful about spending money to try and make a place that would never feel like home look the part. 

“try the lower cupboards,” he said, watching dongwoo flip through old packages of dry seaweed and tylenol pills. 

“already did.” 

“then there’s probably nothing there.” he peered over dongwoo’s shoulder, at the empty shelves. something with legs scuttled in the back too quick to catch, and sunggyu hastily straightened up, motioning for dongwoo to close the door. 

“is there anywhere you need to be today?” he said. 

dongwoo shrugged, casual in a way that conveyed none of the deference he usually showed, and somehow sunggyu was alright with that. “you’re the boss. is there?”

“there could be. i’ll make it worth your while.” 

\---  
longevity was a concept that sunggyu very consciously chose not to think about. longevity, and stability, all those things that were practically impossible in the path he’d so recklessly chosen for himself. but now that dongwoo had returned from the blasted assignment sunggyu should never have sent him on, it was a concept that had been continuously weighing on him. dongwoo defied labels, and by extension, their precarious relationship did the same. yet sunggyu was coming to realize that he had _missed_ dongwoo’s presence in his life, missed the way that he brought laughter into the room with him. 

“dongwoo,” he said, over the quiet buzz of late evening restaurant small talk. sunggyu had thought about how to say any of this without coming across as insecure, or desperate, especially when their relationship had largely progressed and meandered through dark corners and stolen moments much as it always had. sunggyu had put thought into this, but it wasn’t as easy as paying off a few corrupt officials or sniping at rivals from the shadows. “is there ever something that is making you unhappy?” something about me, sunggyu did not say. something about us. 

dongwoo looked up from where his hands fidgeted with the napkin in his lap. sunggyu was suddenly struck again by the feeling that the other did not quite belong here, in the seething underbelly of selfishness that sunggyu had built his life’s work on. 

but dongwoo looked up and laughed. 

“hyung, you really don’t get it, do you?” 

there were some days when sunggyu just wanted to be able to climb into dongwoo’s head, familiarize himself with the intimate cogs and wheels of his thought processes. dongwoo was so open yet incredibly hard to read, and if sunggyu didn’t find it as oddly attractive as he did (if sunggyu didn’t find nearly everything about dongwoo oddly attractive), it would probably have been an annoyance. there was no standard of comparison with dongwoo’s spontaneity. 

“i don’t seem to understand you,” he said. “if there’s anything you want, anything that would make you happy-- i hope you know i’m serious. i don’t make a habit of saying these kinds of things without meaning them--” he was rambling, but sunggyu didn’t know how else to say these things and he didn't want to end up botching this conversation. 

_let me know how to make you happy_ he thought. and surely, living a life on the other side of the law was not anyone’s idea of happiness. 

“i know hyung,” dongwoo said. he looked distracted almost, chin resting on his hand as he looked beyond sunggyu at something only he could see. “you’ve always been honest. but i don’t need anything.” 

“wouldn’t you like to go somewhere nice?” he asked. “somewhere out of the country maybe.” 

“seoul is a nice place,” dongwoo said. 

“seoul is loud,” he said. loud wasn’t quite the right word, but it was part of it. there was an image of the city you couldn’t retract once you looked out over it long enough from high-rise windows, looking down as an outsider at everyday people going about their lives without a care in the world. 

dongwoo reached out an arm, laying his hand over sunggyu’s. “but hyung is here, so seoul is a nice place.” 

“didn’t i tell you that flattery wouldn’t get you anywhere?” he said, and when their laughter mingled together over the hush of other people’s conversations, sunggyu decided that seoul was indeed a nice place. 

\---  
a month later, after the quiet notification of sungyeol’s message sounded through the room, sunggyu once again pondered his own predilection for selfishness. 

“you know,” he said, “when i first met you i thought you were one of the best liars i’d ever met. i’m rather glad i was proven wrong so quickly.” 

dongwoo slid his hands under his shirt. “yeah?” 

“i was supposed to have let you stayed in daegu with woohyun instead of sending sungyeol,” sunggyu traced the edges of his teeth along dongwoo’s collarbone. “it would’ve been a much more extended assignment. it made the most logistic sense, you know.”

dongwoo jerked under him, pulling him forward to press their lips together. the bitter aftertaste of herbal tea lingered in his mouth even after sunggyu pulled away. 

“you didn’t have to do that.” 

_it wasn’t for you_ sunggyu wanted to say. _it was for me. it’s because i’m too much of a selfish bastard._ maybe then dongwoo would see what a mistake this all was. “i didn’t,” he agreed. “i’m hardly a selfless person.” 

a hand cupped his cheek, traced a line down his chin. sunggyu was too fucking soft for this business, and jang dongwoo was living proof of that. “selfishness is often an act of survival, hyung,” dongwoo said. 

sunggyu exhaled. 

there was nothing wrong with this.

**Author's Note:**

> ohh boy this fic has been sitting in my drive for months and months now. my brain must've been mush when i decided to write it in this annoyingly pretentious iteration of past tense but whatever it's finished i don't see it anymore! begone accursed wip!
> 
> this takes place some time before the last part of in these dreams, though the timeline for this verse is a little sketchy regardless. 
> 
> i don't know if these subsequent parts will ever get written anymore but imagine that wooyeol went off to daegu, bonded over how fundamentally unfair they think society is and became romanticish partners, and that soojung and mijoo disagree on a shitton of things, particularly on the way that authority and obedience gets distributed, and bicker constantly and are also vicious lesbian sort of partners leading the rest of lovelyz.


End file.
